Inspired by one of our earliest lectures, where the academic in question said that the three greatest sustainability challenges facing humanity in his view were climate change, biodiversity loss and social inequality, I decided to focus my personal leadership project on the latter. I took the view that through my job and masters work, I was hopefully at least contributing in some positive way towards the first two items on that list, so focusing on social inequality seemed to make sense. However, with everything going in the world (Russia, Ukraine, COVID) and in life (anyone else feeling the dissertation heat?) since the start of 2022, I have to admit that my personal leadership project has fallen by the wayside.
The feeling of hopelessness and despair hearing about the events in Ukraine is very hard to overcome. Carrying on with the idea of sustainability and blog posts feels trivial and frivolous, even. What good is me volunteering a few hours a week in my local community really doing for social inequality when the very idea is being dragged through the mud on a global scale live on TV? The experiences of the Ukrainian people are not fair or right, nor of the ordinary Russian citizens who are suffering the consequences of international sanctions while oligarchs live comfortably elsewhere.
There has also been an uncomfortable racial element I’ve noticed in the responses to this conflict as well. In the UK, the coverage of, and the public response to, the atrocities in Ukraine is noticeably greater than say that of the conflicts in Syria, Yemen or Afghanistan. Similarly, African and South Asian immigrants who were living in Ukraine and trying to flee have shared harrowing stories of being treated like second class citizens in their attempts to escape the country. It really feels like the idea of equality is out of the window when you read such stories.
I am left asking myself what good am I really doing? I found some solace recently in the idea of social tipping points, a concept I am researching for my dissertation. Winkelmann et. al (2022, p. 1) define social tipping processes as “a form of social change whereby a small change can shift a sensitive social system into a qualitatively different state due to strongly self-amplifying…feedback mechanisms”. The idea being that when a small number of individuals change their behaviour, it sends a signal to governments and business that certain legislation or technology will be accepted by the public. This is one of the theories behind the iterative process of public opinion changing over time, to ‘socially tip’ a concept such as action on climate change or even improving social inequality into something that becomes more widely accepted and even desired. I skated over the “small number of individuals” part. What proportion of citizens or individuals need to believe something to trigger the change? This is widely debated, with some consensus around the 17–20% figure (Otto et al. 2020).
So what good is me volunteering a couple of hours a week doing in my local community really doing? Well, I’m telling myself that it is my attempt at being part of that 17–20%. Hopefully, if I and some others care about social inequality, we can build up to that social tipping point such that the issue gets the attention it deserves.
And just like that, it’s as if the universe sensed the resolving of my internal struggles and matched me with a new mentee. Let’s call her Julie for now. I met her earlier this week with the youth workers and her family present. We’re getting pizza on Friday, and I will try my best to ignore all the feelings of despair and hopelessness about Ukraine.
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References
https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/world-news/europe/955993/the-ukraine-war-race-problem
Winkelmann, R. et al. (2022) ‘Social tipping processes towards climate action: A conceptual framework’, Ecological Economics, 192, p. 107242. doi: 10.1016/J.ECOLECON.2021.107242.
Otto, I. M. et al. (2020) ‘Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth’s climate by 2050’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 117(5), pp. 2354–2365. doi: 10.1073/PNAS.1900577117/-/DCSUPPLEMENTAL.
